


Trojan Horse

by pearbear



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Frot, M/M, brief eyeball licking, implied bbkaz, mentions of poor hygiene, mutual crying over big boss, tear licking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-12
Updated: 2016-06-12
Packaged: 2018-07-14 15:50:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7178402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pearbear/pseuds/pearbear
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Venom and Kaz deal with the fallout of the Truth tapes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trojan Horse

**Author's Note:**

> This fic hinges on the assumption that the post credits convo happened after the events of TPP.

Kaz cried often now. It made Venom uncomfortable, the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, the chill going down all the way from his spine to his core. He flipped furiously through his mental Rolodex of Big Boss’s memories, but there had never been a moment when Big Boss had to react to something like this.

The only decency Kaz had about his crying was to do it behind closed doors. It was mostly wet, raspy heaves, as if he was being choked, punctuated by moments of quiet, the false calm before the next round of sobbing. Eventually, he would graduate into small coughs and sharp intakes of breath, until they too died away into complete silence.

The whole affair was always completely wordless. No perpetrators were named.

The soldiers who passed by couldn’t hear it. Venom had encountered it at first when he had meant to drop in under the pretense of consulting on a haoma shortage, his face two inches away from the door. He could only stop and listen silently, unable to enter. He had been doing this for the past four or so times he had heard it happen.

It was the fifth time now. 0858. Guard duty shifts were about to change, and he nodded at the soldiers scrambling to their posts to replace their comrades. They saluted him in return. Despite it being nightfall, the atmosphere was oppressively balmy. The heat pressed down through his clothes and made the metal of his shrapnel feel like it could burn through his skull.

Venom found himself by Kaz’s office again, footfalls silent through habit. He balled his good hand, limp at his side, halfway into a fist.

He didn’t knock.

The sobs were muffled, but still wafted through the locked door like a lingering unnatural odor.

Venom could no longer fall back on Kaz and Big Boss’s unspoken familiarity to ease the situation. The glamour had been removed weeks ago, and any ease between him and Kaz flickered out of existence in an instant. He himself didn’t hold much resentment towards the deception; he wanted to believe that his old self wanted this. If not, there wasn’t much of his old self left to resent anything, and Big Boss’ implanted personality was not that of a grudge holder, nor of a man who cared much about anything anymore.

He stood in darkness, seagulls cawing distantly overhead, the puffs of his breathing and the sobs coming from inside alternating with regularity. It was soothing in a way, Kaz’s louder, strangled noises dictating the cadence of his own inhalation and exhalation.

He had considered attempting to comfort his XO. Kaz’s change in attitude had been abrupt, cold, a blue fire that masked the intensity of his fury. He had stopped looking Venom in the eyes or making the effort of clambering up the helipad when Venom came back from missions. Over the radio, his advice was minimal, almost seething, as if it had to be scraped out of him, and he more often than not deferred to Venom’s other supports.

Ocelot, whose behavior now seemed flippant in its regularity, had privately raised concerns about their XO’s increasingly aberrant behavior. It was all delivered with the pity a victor suddenly had about the hurt feelings of his competitors.

“Boss, you’ve got to do something about it.”

Of course, it was Venom’s responsibility.

His hand had been raised to the door the first few times he had heard the noises, knuckles brushing the metal, ready to knock, ready to let Kaz eat him alive if it meant he would stop being devoured by his demons.

There was so much they had shared. The unbridled expansion of Diamond Dogs, which grew faster in six months with their combined efforts than MSF had in three years; the destruction of Skull Face, who had snuffed out their comrades’ lives and almost a decade off their own. Sahelanthropus stood as a towering monument to their achievements, sinking their base inch by inch every day with the weight of its meaning, its shadow dwarfing the platform it stood on during the sunset.

It was nothing but a husk, defanged, not an assertion of youthful power like ZEKE had been, but Venom still needed it there. A mark. Even Kaz had agreed Sahelanthropus’ corpse had meant something. He had let it stay.

All the things they did together. They should have been enough.

Still, on the very inside, in a part that Zero and Ocelot had left untouched, Venom knew that recounting everything was meaningless. His commander had only been willing to make those memories with the real Big Boss.

So he fell back on doing what he had always done.

“I know you’re listening.”

Venom’s breath caught for a moment. He didn’t respond.

“You sick son of a bitch.”

He still didn’t respond.

“Is this fun to you? Just… just standing around outside and listening in, like this is all another track on your Walkman?”

He stayed silent.

“Fuck you.”

With the raggedness of Kaz’s voice and the occasional hiccups, there was no real bile in his words.

Venom finally spoke. “Kaz. Let me in.”

Everything was silent for a minute, then two, then three. Venom waited. Eventually, the door was unlatched with a click. He stepped inside, closing the entrance behind him.

The entire room was dimly lit save for a fluorescent lamp on Kaz’s desk. The shards of a mug were scattered on the floor, the liquid dried into a brown ring. A file cabinet lay on its side in a far corner, the manila folders spilling out onto the ground like entrails, and a line of discarded used tissues lay around the room, all half-assedly thrown in the direction of the wastebasket. Only the desk was neat, papers stacked such that every edge touched perfectly, pens all stick straight in their cup, like that single area could be a microcosm of self-control.

Venom stepped around to face Kaz. The glasses hid most of the damage; the remaining evidence of his past activity was a blotchy complexion and a pink upper lip, ostensibly gained from from repeatedly wiping a running nose. Venom leaned in close out of habit. The gap between their faces shortened to a few centimeters, the blotches on his face a map, the breath between them thick enough to fog.

Kaz quickly stepped back as if he’d been burned.

Venom furrowed his brow. “Talk. Get it out.”

“I’ve got nothing to say to you,” Kaz spat.

Venom stared at him. He knew that whatever choice words Kaz had were reserved for Big Boss. He didn’t merit any.  

Still, he took the more difficult path.

“We can’t keep going like this. The men are noticing. It’s affecting morale.”

“You think I care about that anymore? I’m getting my work done.”

“That’s not what this is about.” Venom regarded Kaz coolly. Kaz would not meet his gaze. “The threads between all the soldiers here have always been cut thin. I need what’s between us three – you, Ocelot, and me – to do the pull. Our bonds have to be stronger. Or at least look like it. You’ve been visibly lashing out at me over the past few weeks.”

“Not everyone can pretend as well as you or Ocelot.”

“It’s not pretend. We have a duty. I have a duty. This is my life now.”

“If you’re content to have your hopes and dreams ripped from you and replaced with someone else’s, then so be it.” Kaz was determined not to look at him. “I can’t do this anymore. I’m… I’m only human. Diamond Dogs can stand on its own two legs now. Big B… It doesn’t need me, and I don’t need Diamond Dogs. My job here is done.”

Venom grabbed his shoulder. “Don’t go.”

Kaz drew back again, this time with greater force. “Stop-”

Venom’s unrelenting grip was his only response.

“Get – get the hell off me. You’re nothing but his Trojan horse, all carved up in a pretty shape to raze everything we ever had to the ground. I should’ve known, from the day we came back, from the way you didn’t–"

“Kaz.”

At the mention of his name, Kaz stilled. His gaze was still averted.

“Kaz… I need you.”

It was genuine, but came out feeling like an echo of something Big Boss had said decades earlier to someone else. Kaz finally looked at him. His face was disfigured into a look of unbridled disgust, his teeth bared and clenched.

Then he started crying again.  

Venom’s first, basest instinct was to run away. He was tired. Continuing all of this would be folly. Those tears were not shed for him.

But Kaz had allowed him to see him like this. Some part of Venom relished being privy to such raw emotion. His memory of every kiss Big Boss and Kaz shared back in the 70’s paled in comparison to the way Kaz ate his face as soon as Afghanistan was a blur of desert and mountain ridges below them. That kiss had seared with a passion continually smelted and refined through nine years of waiting, hoping, and wanting.

All the emotional weight of nearly a decade of absence had been loaded into what Kaz had given Venom. That was part of why he had nothing left to say to him anymore. 

Venom. No, not Venom.

_Now do you remember? Who you really are? What you were meant to do?_

Big Boss’s crackling voice roiled in his consciousness. He still didn’t remember. There were flashes of recall; they came in like lightning and left like mist, leaving everything amorphous and in shades of grey.

He desperately searched for afterimages of himself in Big Boss’s implanted memories – attaching a balloon to a strong - six foot tall? - man, footsteps following closely behind, rubber gloves smelling of antiseptic, the heat rolling off a broader back, a silent quirk of the mouth half hidden by Jackdaw’s bald head, _Kaz can be a real teenager sometimes, huh?_ , playing cards with Chico in a far off corner of the room, the scene slotted between the crack of a door, _If it had been another time, this man could have easily been in my boots._  

_No time for anesthetic._

When he rolled the word Medic over and over again in his thoughts, examining it from all angles as if it were an opaque marble, it still sounded like someone else. Even during the days of MSF, his real name, his hometown, his parents, maybe even a dark haired spouse had all been flung into the abyss in favor of a pared down identity, one that spoke only of his function and nothing else.

The ashes of the men and women that had settled into his pores had been the same. They thought that they had been fighting for themselves, that they’d stripped away borders to be who they really were. In the end, they had given up their identities, their families, their lives – everything that had made them human.

All to augment Big Boss’s legacy. 

After everything that had happened, the man could only send over a tape. Medic had died in the wreckage of a hospital, and he could only be acknowledged by the shards of a mirror. He knew why. The reason was branded into his brain. Big Boss had died years ago, and his soul was in limbo somewhere in east Europe, wandering aimlessly towards a singular, brilliant white point it would never reach.

It was not wrong for Kaz to be angry.

“…Boss.” Kaz’s voice was suddenly quiet. Even.

“Kaz?”

Kaz stepped closer. He looked at him intently now, through tear tracks and dripping snot.

  
“There’s something on your face.”

Venom touched his own cheek, then drew his fingers away slowly. He examined the tips, rubbing his forefinger and thumb together to understand the sensation. It was wet.

Kaz stared. His sobs were dying down to heavy, stilted nasal puffs. His expression held some sympathy, but it was mostly one of wonder. Clearly, he’d never seen Big Boss do this before.   

“He’s hurt you, too.”

Venom said nothing in response and turned away. He didn’t even realize what had happened. Big Boss hadn’t cried once in the decade before the coma. There had been no lack of situations he could have, should have.

But he didn’t.

Venom had already done it in front of the sink, after the cassette from the Man Who Sold The World came to a standstill. He had only realized his body’s betrayal days later – up until then, he had been convinced there was a leak in the ceiling.

Something suddenly clattered to the ground. A cane. Kaz strode forward, wobbling slightly on his good leg; he took Venom’s chin in his hand and jerked it to face him so he could take in whatever semblance of Big Boss’s remorse he could get.   

His hand traveled further up Venom’s face, his gloved thumb resting on the scar running below the eye. A stray tear rolled down over the leather.

Kaz’s voice was a whisper. “He really did a number on you, huh?”

“No… This… It’s not like that. I owe him. Everything,” Venom said.               

Kaz snorted.

“Don’t be stupid. It’s plain as day. You feel used too, don’t you? Had your soul ripped out and sprinkled into a million little pieces in the direction of Costa Rica, and your body sent below, far below six feet under, straight to hell.” Kaz’s grip on Venom’s face suddenly turned iron. “That’s what you’ve been through, what I’ve been through. We’re both men who’ve had everything taken from us.”

Venom fell back into his customary silence. Kaz paused, then went on, taking his lack of response as affirmation. He usually did.

“No… Not everything’s gone. There’s still something left. You still have something… somebody left inside you. The tears you’re shedding. Your emotions. They’re not a weakness. They make you a better man, and they’ll make you stronger.”   

 _Stronger than him_ was left unsaid. Venom could see that.    

That wasn’t what he wanted. He had his small betrayals, but he could never fully compete against Big Boss. He could never turn against someone whose pain he felt as his own, the depth of whose feeling was acutely etched into every single nerve of his body.

He knew Kaz would not accept that as an answer.

“We’ll make each other stronger,” said Venom softly. “You can lean on me. And I - ” he closed his bionic hand into a fist, and then opened it - “need you to point the way. To guide me.”  He placed his flesh hand over Kaz’s, gently removing it from his face, lacing their fingers together for a brief moment before both their palms fell to their sides.

This was nice. A comfortable moment of silence. Like they used to have.

They both stepped closer at the same time, unconsciously, distance shortening to a few inches, Kaz’s gait still unsteady without his cane. Up close, the fresh tear tracks and the white crust around the ridges of his nostrils were noticeable.

Somehow, their mouths ended up pressed together, chastely at first, separating, and then going back with increased fervor as if breaching newer and newer depths.

In a moment when their faces didn’t quite link, Venom’s tongue veered off course to land on Kaz’s cheek. The salty taste of his tears had mingled with the sandpaper grit of his scruff. He tightened his grip on the front of Venom’s fatigues.

Venom did it again, Kaz’s face firmly grasped in his hands, his tongue traveling closer to the other’s eye, pushing up the frames of his aviators. He swiped at the bottom ridge, feeling the corrugation of eyelashes and a satisfying saline burst on his tongue. Big Boss’s memories immediately pushed a recall of briny seaspray to the forefront of his brain.

Kaz moaned. At this, Venom suddenly became aware of what he was doing. He was enjoying this, glad that they could, at least for a while, go back to the time when Venom could defuse Kaz with a touch when he didn’t have the right words at the tip of his tongue. But maybe this wasn’t what Kaz needed.

Maybe this was wrong.

_Boss, you’ve got to do something about it._

Kaz leaned against his desk for balance, his hand on Venom’s side. He was still sniffling at intervals. Venom inhaled deeply, trying to clear his own nose. His hand hovered over Kaz’s shoulder.

_“We shouldn’t do this,” said Venom._

_Kaz leaned up into his ear._

_“Show me how much of a better man you are,” he hissed._

_“Kaz, I can’t. I’m not. That’s not what I want.” This isn’t what’s good for you._

_“What you want? Is that Big Boss’s answering machine speaking, or really you? The real you, that sheds tears? The real you, that they tore apart and rebuilt into… this… sick instrument?”_

_“Me.”_

_Kaz gave him a hard look, then shoved him off roughly. “So you wanted to be like this? Brought back from the dead… mangled… used mercilessly, then inevitably tossed aside? You’re content to live, breathe, and die being treated like a glorified meat shield?”_

_“He gave himself to me.”_

_The cane was picked up off the ground. Kaz released himself from under Venom’s weight, then spun around so the rubber end of his walking aid squarely jabbed Venom in the chest._

_“Get out,” he snarled._

_“Kaz.”_

_“I said, ‘Get out!’”_

The consequences played out within a few seconds in Venom’s head. The door would be slammed shut behind him for a final time. He didn’t know why it was so vital that Kaz had to stay, at least for a while. Venom planted his good hand on Kaz’s shoulder, anchoring him in place. He moved his bionic one to take off the glasses.

Kaz swatted his hand away.

“No,” he said.

“Sensitive?”

“That doesn’t matter. Do you know why I keep my eyes like this? My vision blurry, my J. Freys in place? Makes it easier to look at you. Easier to pretend.”

Venom was quiet for a moment.

“This isn’t about him,” he said. “It’s about us. I want you to look at me. Who I am.”

Sometimes he wondered how cobwebbed over Kaz’s vigil for Big Boss was. How much he had turned over the stones of Big Boss’s bones in Kaz’s memory, given flesh to his presence in Kaz’s mind, so much so that the real Big Boss became the stranger, the phantom, albeit one that lingered eternally in the air between them.

This was all about him, for him. He had shackled them together. There was nowhere else for them to look at but each other.

So the glasses came off. The lapel of Kaz’s light blue shirt became increasingly dotted with wet navy patches as their mouths met again and again. He felt Kaz’s teeth briefly at his throat, his beard dragging along the edges of his Adam’s apple. When they slotted their mouths together, Venom tasted salt, unbrushed teeth, and stale coffee.

He swiveled Kaz around and pushed him onto the desk. Kaz’s various clasps, buttons, and other self-imposed chastity devices were dispatched with efficiently, the vest, glove, gun holster, and collared shirt soon a heap on the floor, his pants loose around his hips.

He nosed the curls of Kaz’s chest hair, traced the white scar lines on what remained of Kaz’s right arm with his tongue. He sucked on the puckered skin, shoved his tongue deep into the caverns created by what was once bloody and raw.

There was a hiss in response, but he ignored it. He wasn’t sure if he knew what he was doing. When it came to intimacy, he never really knew what he was doing. It was always a series of instinctive physical reactions.

But that was alright, since he knew now that every time he touched Kaz, he rewrote a little more of what Big Boss had been like.

The sniffling between them was still an ever present background noise. When Venom drew up again to face Kaz, he felt the buckles around his own pants slowly being undone, Kaz’s hand reaching under the large pouch dangling over his ass and into his underwear. The hand groped its way inch by inch across the expanse of his glutes, then his hip, and then finally came to nestle in his pubes, a thumb at the base of his cock and an index finger in the dip of his scrotum.

He was bent over Kaz, whose back was to the wall behind the desk, exposed eyes seemingly in their own orbit, never fixed on Venom even as they were staring directly in front of him, like two distant bloodshot moons. His skin felt sticky. Kaz’s breath on his face, still stilted by hiccups, fanned the furnace inside him, the prickling wetness at his eyes like steam.

Kaz’s hand was cool, dry, smooth from its perpetual leather confinement. It rolled Venom’s balls around for a bit, kneading them, squeezing them, and then graduated into pumping him. He continued on, his fist always a cage around Venom’s softest parts, until he drew it away to pull down his own underwear. Upon seeing the accumulation of dirt and blood on his hand that had resulted from pawing at Venom’s body, he paused for a moment, wiping his palm on his pants.

With his newly naked hand, he drew both their dicks together, and spread Venom’s precum down both their lengths.

Venom watched him. Kaz’s shoulders were still shaking irregularly. Droplets would fall onto his collarbone, and Venom didn’t know which one of them they were from. He pressed in closer, chest inches away from chest, his arms pillars at Kaz’s sides.  

“Do you really want to do this?” he asked.

“You’re a mess too,” said Kaz.

Venom grunted. “Touché.”

He cleared his throat, cleared his nose, and bit his lip. The pace at which Kaz was working became faster. His touch felt increasingly feverish and rough on Venom’s skin as the precum dried. It hurt. The groaning and panting between them was indistinguishable, the puffs of breath in unison a single thick, invisible, humid haze. He began laying kisses haphazardly all over Kaz’s face again; on the jut of his brow, on the tip of his nose, on the fuzzy bend in his cheek, which was still sticky and tasted of salt.

A jolt of intense pleasure suddenly rocked through Venom, making him bite down, leaving a bruise on Kaz’s face. Then it was over.

Kaz looked like he wanted to say something cutting, but he didn’t. He guided Venom’s hand to his still unfulfilled erection.

“Do it,” he said.

Venom obliged. He curled his fingers around Kaz’s dick. His first instinct had always been to grip it like a gun, but it would always be chased away by something else. He worked mindlessly, his hand sliding along Kaz’s shaft in short, even motions, limited by going at it dry. The gasping beneath him blurred into a buzz at the edge of his ears. He pressed his face into the crook of Kaz’s neck, felt Kaz’s shoulders rising and falling rapidly, leaving little patches of heat whenever they came into contact with his forehead, his own slick sweat bleeding onto Kaz’s dry skin. The gasping beneath him became more and more strained, until they finally gave way to a single croak. It was his signal to stop. He withdrew his hand.

Kaz was wheezing. Venom moved to grab some tissues. He carefully wiped the front of Kaz’s stomach, then the front of his fatigues. The tissues were tossed into the wastebasket, the lone few among the rest of their brethren on the floor. Kaz’s glasses were firmly back in place on his face again, the redness in his complexion this time partially due to exertion.

They pulled up their pants simultaneously. Venom silently helped Kaz off his desk, picked up his cane. The discarded shirt, vest, gun holster, and glove were scooped up off the floor, unceremoniously handed over. Kaz pulled the glove on with his teeth while Venom adjusted his shirt for him around his shoulders. He did the buttons up slowly, every flash of gold easily snapping into place through their rightful hole, every moment of silence to be relished. Kaz watched him wordlessly. He let him, even leaned into him.   

When they were both some vague semblance of wholeness again, covered, they stood facing each other.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” said Kaz. 

Those were the words Venom wanted to hear. He closed the door behind him.

**Author's Note:**

> I've always wanted to see a fic where Kaz attempts to use Venom as his post credits conversation implied ("I'll make the phantom and his sons stronger, to send him there"). Of course, it wouldn't work out well. I apologize for writing the 49830th fic in which Kaz is sensitive about his glasses being removed and for any other apparent retreads. I edited my last fic to hell but left my more… uh… florid tendencies in this one, and I hope they work. Thank you for reaching the end. As always, constructive criticism is greatly appreciated.


End file.
